I n her early 20s, Michelle Goodman landed a job as a publicity assistant at a Manhattan book publishing company.

It was everything she thought she wanted, until she found herself sharing a cubicle with a family of mice.

The sticky traps, along with endless hours of data entry and photocopying and scowling subway commuters were a rude awakening.

So when a newspaper editor offered her freelance work that paid per article what her cubicle job tallied up in a week, she began envisioning a world outside of the 9-to-5 format. At 24, she re-invented her life as a freelance writer and editor.

Today, Goodman earns a respectable living, choosing jobs on her own terms and her own time. She”s got health insurance, a mortgage and retirement savings to boot, and recently published “The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube” (Seal Press, 220 pages; $14.95)

She chronicles her early years: With no idea of how to negotiate a contract, she was frequently underpaid, took on the wrong clients and often struggled to pay her bills. Learning to build a name and a business was a long process.

That learning curve is the foundation for her book, which she describes as the book she wishes she”d read before going solo.

“The Anti 9-to-5 Guide” is a readable mix of hard numbers and examples that shed light on the face of the American workplace, where one in 11 adult women is an entrepreneur and women own nearly half of its privately owned businesses.

Goodman talks of channeling your inner She-E-O, networking, budgeting, business planning and the bittersweet realities of discipline and distractions.

She highlights women who”ve crafted careers outside of a cubicle, from filmmakers, rangers and Web producers to an engineer with a fitness-training firm on the side.

“The people I interviewed for the book and for the articles on self-employment I”ve written over the past several years have all said that when it comes to work, they value quality of life, flexibility and autonomy above all else,” says Goodman. “So even on our worst days — because believe me, self-employment is not total bliss; it”s still a job — we”d rather be our own bosses than back in the cube we walked away from.”

Before her mouse encounters in New York, Goodman and I worked together briefly at a grinding group of Southern California weeklies, often pulling 10- and 12-hour days.

These days, she writes frequently about self-employment, along with articles and essays about everything from pop culture and dating to generational gaps in the workplace.

As one who has continued within the confines of the cubicle world, I read her book with the fascination of one glimpsing at the road less traveled.